Once San Antonio’s go-to retail corridor, Houston Street has become hit or miss  sometimes buzzing with activity, other times as empty as a ghost town.

Though it continues to inch along, the thoroughfare has lacked that one big jolt for a lasting revival.

The impetus, however, now may be in sight, because of two recent major land deals that downtown observers believe could bring the good times back to the commercial district.

Specifically, Weston Urban last month proposed building Frost Bank’s new headquarters  a tower the height of which is not yet determined  diagonally across from the bank’s longtime home at 100 W. Houston St.

The deal, worth at least $230 million between the two companies and the city of San Antonio, includes swapping 10 properties in the area.

The tower would add 400,000 square feet of first-class office space and additional retail. The city plans to consolidate many of its offices into the current Frost headquarters. Weston Urban also has agreed to add at least 265 residential units to properties it would acquire from the city and Frost.

The agreement is set to go before the City Council on June 4. The tower could be completed in late 2019 or early 2020.

East of the San Antonio River on Houston, GrayStreet Partners has snatched up nine properties once owned by a Maryland-based investment group. The portfolio includes two of the street’s most recognizable buildings: the Vogue and the Kress.

Although many of the buildings acquired by GrayStreet have long-term tenants, some wiggle room exists for new retail space and development.

Downtowners have heard all of this before when it comes to Houston Street. Will the deals finally bring a consistent rhythm to the strip? Or will the street continue to sputter along?

Depending on the time and day of the week, Houston Street can be a bustling place with sidewalks clogged with pedestrians and streets jammed with traffic.

At lunchtime on workdays, the intersection of Houston and St. Mary’s streets is full of workers spilling out from office buildings, some residents, panhandlers and tourists gliding around on Segways. Nearby, on nights when the Majestic Theatre marquee is pulsing with light, showgoers fill the restaurants, eventually gravitating toward the Majestic, through its doors and to their seats.

San Antonians flock to the street for special occasions. Houston Street is closed to traffic for Artpace’s Chalk It Up arts festival, where professional and amateur artists doodle on the pavement. It’s also closed for the cattle drive, which ushers in the rodeo season every February.

Yet, absent an event or office traffic, the street often is empty. Some shops and restaurants usually close within a few years because of inconsistent foot traffic.

“The other times are important  or more important  on how the street functions,” said Richard Tangum, director of UTSA’s Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research, referring to the downtimes.

So what to do? Add more shops and restaurants and then, a few years from now, more shoppers and diners. That seems to be the accepted strategy.

“There are so many empty retail spaces,” said Nichole Thomas, who lives with her husband and daughter in the Vistana apartment building on the far west end of the street. “People go to the River Walk to eat. It would be really nice to see people come to Houston Street to shop.”

GrayStreet managing partner Kevin Covey said he wants to concentrate on adding more retail and restaurants in the next year. Many of the properties he recently purchased already have long-term tenants. But he sees some possibilities.

At the former Frost Bros. building, for example, insurance provider Catto & Catto occupies two street-level retail spaces. But instead of a shop or a restaurant, two large conference rooms face the street. If you’re lucky, they’re having a meeting; at least there are other humans to look at. Otherwise, they are empty rooms.

“That’s one of the most glaring opportunities on Houston Street to reposition,” Covey, who said Catto & Catto may be close to relocating.

Covey also envisions building a structure on a vacant lot at Houston and Jefferson streets and tying it into the adjacent Kress, the upper floors of which remain empty. The developer hasn’t yet decided a use for that site, but said he prefers residential.

Veronica Sandoval, who has operated Tienda La Garza for five years, agrees with the strategy, especially the east end of Houston closer to the Alamo.

“This is a good little strip,” she said, “but just not enough of an attraction to bring people to this end of Houston Street.”

She struggles to make ends meet because there is not enough sidewalk traffic, she says.

“If I didn’t have income coming in from somewhere else, I don’t think I’d be here,” Sandoval said. “The foot traffic is very thin on this end.”

And yet some blocks get a natural flow of pedestrians.

Once Sandoval’s neighbor, Philip Schrank recently moved his glass art gallery Gallery Vetro two blocks up Houston Street, closer to the Majestic Theatre, and he saw a 20 percent increase in sidewalk traffic.

“Every month has been better,” Schrank said. “Some marginally, some more so.”

What ails Houston Street and the rest of downtown are the gaps. When tourists or locals aren’t visiting, or during non-office hours, the street depends on downtown residents. Since 2011, none of the new multifamily projects either built or in the works  approximately 5,000 units, by city calculations  are located in the downtown core.

“We need to achieve that blend of population to make it more vibrant in the long term,” Tangum said.

To help achieve more residents, Weston Urban plans to add at least 265 residential units to many of its downtown holdings. And Covey said his group is under contract to purchase five more parcels, most of them vacant lots, that are within a block of Houston Street.

A view of Houston Street in 1930 shows the Texas Theater on the left, the Majestic Theatre on the right. EXPRESS-NEWS FILE PHOTOA view west down Houston Street in 1964. The building that houses Allens is now a parking lot. EXPRESS-NEWS FILE PHOTO

Street’s heyday

The late 1940s were Houston Street’s heyday as the city’s retail destination, said Tangum, who has studied Houston Street over the years.

East of the river, many buildings from that era remain, including the Sheraton Gunter Hotel, the Brady and Majestic buildings and the Emily Morgan Hotel. Built as the Medical Arts Building, the 13-story structure has served as Houston Street’s east terminus since 1924.

Others have not. Built in the 1920s, the Texas Theatre was demolished in the early 1980s, its facade incorporated into the IBC Bank building. In the late 1940s, that little stretch of Houston Street near the river also was home to soda water shop Blue Bird, the Hertzberg Jewelry Co. and the Rainbow Grill.

The east half of Houston Street then was home to such iconic stores as the Frost Bros., Carl’s (women’s clothes), S.H. Kress & Co., The Vogue (now an office building), the Walgreens (still active), J.C. Penny and F.W. Woolworth.

About a dozen barbershops dotted the street. Medical and lawyers’ offices occupied the multifloor buildings. Drugstores, too: three Sommers locations in five blocks, among others.

Head farther east, toward the Medical Arts Building, and you’d run across places like Navarro Club (billiards hall), Malone’s Candyland and Honey-Kist ice cream parlor.

“It’s still the commercial corridor of the city,” Tangum said of the late 1940s.

The west half of Houston Street was just as active, but with more of a Mexican-American influence. Just past the river was the Prince Theatre, Baen Book Store, Coney Island Cafe and the Elite and Savoy hotels.

More theaters: the Oberto and the Joy. Dink’s Place (a restaurant). The Choe Kung Tong Chinese masonic lodge. The Two X Bar. And the iconic Casa Blanca Restaurant. Wedged between Red’s Cafe and Red’s Wine & Liquor was George’s Hamburger Stand.

Then came the exodus to the suburbs.

“After 1945, into the late 1940s and early 1950s, you see that movement out to the suburbs, the beginning of urban sprawl,” Tangum said. “And, of course, the doctors follow, retail follows, and what happens is Houston Street looses its vitality.”

Urban Renewal came around in the 1950s and ’60s and razed many of the commercial buildings, but also many of the near-West Side neighborhoods. “In doing that, the downtown district lost its customer base,” Tangum said.

Houston Street limped along until another urban renewal effort called Tri Party came around in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The plan to widen the sidewalks and add nuances to the streetscape was the nail in the coffin  killing many of the retailers who did not survive years of torn-up streets.

A new effort to revive Houston Street was launched in the late 1990s. Then, Federal Realty Investment Trust of Maryland purchased nine properties on the street. The group built the Hotel Valencia and refurbished the Vogue and Kress buildings, among other improvements.

The city, in cooperation with Federal Realty, formed the Houston Street Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, in an attempt to fund future upgrades. The money helped pay for the revamping of the Presa Street Bridge, a project meant to entice River Walk strollers to venture up to the street level.

But it brought Houston Street only so far.

In the works

New development on Houston Street has been slow in recent years, but the pace is picking up.

Completed in 2009, the Vistana apartment building added about 250 residential units to the far west end of Houston Street. The next year, the Embassy Suites just west of the river added another hotel and Lüke, a restaurant by acclaimed New Orleans chef John Besh.

They joined the Majestic, the IBC Bank and Frost buildings, the Brady apartment building, the Valencia and Gunter hotels, and Bohanan’s Prime Steaks & Seafood, as Houston Street pillars.

Currently, the only ongoing construction is the Hilton Garden Inn on the 400 block of East Houston Street. Owner Baywood Hotels of Greenbelt, Maryland, also owns two other Houston Street hotels: Home2 Suites (the former South Texas Bank) and the TownePlace Suites by Marriott (the former Neisner building).

Local developer David Adelman recently purchased the historic Maverick apartment building and plans to renovate the decaying structure.

Weston Urban is renovating the Rand Building at 110 E. Houston St. as the new home of Geekdom, additional office space and retail on the ground floor.

A block east, Woodbine Development of Dallas is designing a 21-story hotel facing Houston Street on the site of the long-vacant Book, Clegg and Solo Serve buildings. A few years from now, the developer says it wants to add a residential building to the River Walk site.

None would have the impact of a new office tower. City leaders are excited about the possible symbiotic development  buildings for housing, retail and perhaps more office  when paired with the planned $175 million San Pedro Creek project, just west of the tower site. Officials with Bexar County, footing most of the bill, envision another tree- and path-lined urban oasis similar to the River Walk.

“It should bode very well for the west end of our downtown,” said Pat DiGiovanni, CEO and president of the nonprofit Centro San Antonio.

The pending vacancy of the San Antonio Children’s Museum and the sale of the now-vacant Burns building offer two more possibilities for new tenants.

“Downtown San Antonio has reached a critical mass of interest for a lot of people who want to live there, for office users,” Covey said. “This is something that takes a complete spectrum of interest, from investors to end users and everything in between. Downtown San Antonio has that now. I don’t think that was true two years ago.”

Others, like Sandoval, worry about hanging on, that the new retail and development can’t come soon enough.

“I really love Houston Street,” Sandoval said. “I would really like to see it flourish. I just hope I’m here when it does. I don’t want to be one of the pioneers who couldn’t see it through to fruition.”